SVG Tutorial

That is true, good idea. I might update it with a note on this

That... never occurred to me. Cool tip that actually might save me a lot of time some day.

As a frontend dev who also works in UX and graphics from time to time, I find it helpful to be able to do both, looking at SVGs as both a vector graphics format and a human-readable XML. IME the workflow depends more on whether any SVG is meant to be illustrative (like art) or quantitative (like charts) or interactive and animated/mutable (like a game).

For something like this bell example (https://svg-tutorial.com/svg/bell), you can certainly hand-code it if you're really math-inclined and can estimate the formulas of curves just by looking at them, but for us mere mortals, it's easier to just draw out the curves in a graphics app (like https://youtu.be/5x2uHUB_pzw?si=fSLjRKlZNgVKVcOx&t=123 for Figma) then export as an SVG. And for things like the ringer (is that what you call it? the orange ball thing at the bottom of the bell that strikes the bell to make the sound), being able to visually draw it on a canvas, change its size, drag it around and play with its colors and dimensions, etc. is really helpful. Figma is fine for simpler graphics, but it's really more of a UX tool than a graphic design tool, and Illustrator is a lot more powerful. Inkscape is a FOSS option.

In other circumstances, though, manipulating the SVG XML directly is also very helpful. Let's say you want to programatically generate a bar chart. If you have a big dataset, it's going to take a designer forever to manually plot them and change them every time the data changes. But it's easy for a dev to use Javascript (or any language) to draw each rectangle, programmatically adjust their heights and colors based on the data, add tooltips, etc. And that way you can dynamically update them in real-time whenever the data changes (like if the user selects a different date range, or new events come in). A lot of this is made easier by libs like https://frappe.io/charts or https://apexcharts.com. But before you take that approach, you should know that for complex charts, sometimes Canvas rendering (or just generating graphics in the backend) can be more performant than SVG.

SVGs can also be animated and interactive, not just with CSS transitions but by directly manipulating the XML geometries, like http://snapsvg.io/demos/ or https://www.svgator.com/ or https://codepen.io/collection/XpwMLO/. This is fine for product pages and such, but for really graphics-intensive apps (full games) it's probably slower than other rendering pipelines. (Not my specialty, won't speculate too much.)

TLDR Drawing them in a graphics app is usually easier for the designers, but the XML can be programmatically manipulated afterward to great effect. The ideal workflow depends on what you're trying to accomplish, and also who you have on your team.

Yeah, I've seen React pages where a tiny icon (like a little star) is inlined a hundred times on the same page. That's a lot of extra bytes :(

At least if they're in the same JSX component, the server can gzip that SVG string so it's not as big over the wire. But if the same icon gets used in different pages, the costs multiply.

It's nice to have the OPTION of treating SVG as code when you want it to be code, but otherwise, it's better for the user to treat it as a graphic and let the usual caching mechanisms (server+browser) do their jobs.

Okay, I fixed the links to the interactive demos (somehow deep links do not always work on that site, probably because it's made with Vue). I don't see the problem with bio.link. What issue do you see?